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    Jampi
    Jampi
    Jampi
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Jampi

    By ALWYN LAU

    ()

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    About this ebook

    To 'kena jampi' is to be spellcast. There are many Malaysias' and all of them are bewitched. Cursed with pain, spooked with love.

     

    This novel presents Malaysia via a kaleidoscope of voices: Malay, Chinese, Indian, working mum, racist, car thief, schizo, outcast, fallen angel, corrupt cop.

     

    From a restaurant in Cheras to a hospital in Selayang to a Chinese temple in Bentong, "Jampi" narrates multiple lives stuffed with chaos, heartache and Bak Kut Teh; hearts intermingled with joy, love and traffic jams. Together they render and rend asunder what it means to be Malaysian.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherALWYN LAU
    Release dateJul 1, 2020
    ISBN9780463720592
    Jampi

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      Book preview

      Jampi - ALWYN LAU

      Jampi

      Copyright 2020 Alwyn Lau

      Published by Alwyn Lau @ Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.  If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Disclaimer

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental

      Table of Contents

      Book 1

      Kok Wai and the Wedding in Cheras

      Richard and the Miracle in Selayang

      Roslan and Weaponized Outside Food

      Book 2

      The Monk and Malaysia’s Hikikomori

      Teck Choo and Spiritual S&P in Bentong

      Book 3

      The Demon’s Sermon and Choo’s 3 Curses

      Book 4

      Syamsul and GE14 Showdown in Kapar

      Mark and Daylight Car Robbery in PJ Old Town

      Book 5

      Gopal and the Voice

      About Alwyn Lau

      Connect with Alwyn Lau

      Dedicated to every Malaysian I know (and have yet to).

      Jampi (Malay), n. magical spell, charm.

      BOOK 1

      Kok Wai

      WANNA HEAR AN AWRY tale? This one I call Mission Impossible (or Damn Hard) in Cheras.

      My granddad, he was a survivor.

      When he was only a few hours old, he was left in a dumpster in Hainan Island. That’s a huge-ass island off the southern coast of China which everyone associates with chicken rice and insanity (the Hainan ‘wind’, they call it).

      I don’t think it’s fair to label an entire ethnic community psychotically prone, but I guess life isn’t fair and it doesn’t owe you bird shit.

      In the case of my granddad, life didn’t even owe him a warm bed and his mummy’s tits after he squeezed out of her—it just left him crying among refuse. It seems his mum dumped him in a trash site right after he was born. That was an insane way to start life on earth for my kung-kung, being chucked out like yesterday’s leftovers.

      Anyway, someone must’ve found him and put him in whatever passed for an orphanage in those days. Ten bucks says if he were still alive he’d be shocked at the kinds of ‘hardship’ Malaysian youngsters complain about these days.

      Nowadays no Wi-fi also complain, Grab driver come ten seconds late also grumble, miss green light also macam miss a milestone in life. Some more so damn PC one. Some fella crack a joke about race or sex or God or politics INSTANTLY kena offended one. Softie generation la ni.

      Try being abandoned by the people who are supposed to love you, then see how you complain la.

      Fast forward about two decades from my granddad’s birth-trash site. I don’t know how he met my grandmum but, well, they met somehow.

      They fell in love (whatever that meant during those times), got on a boat, and made their way to Malaysia, which wasn’t called ‘Malaysia’ yet, maybe it was called Malaya or something else but trust me when I say that nobody at that time gave a shit what the land was called, least of all my grandparents.

      Like thousands of other mainland Chinese, once they arrived they began to scrape out a living doing everything they could i.e. beg, slog, pray, ‘borrow’. I sure hope sex work wasn’t involved cos that would totally mess up my family tree.

      Was my granddad a violent guy, you ask? No la.

      I know it was the era of Chinese triad gangsta type. You sometimes see their modern-day great-grandkids still in action in Facebook vids. These are mean, evil buggers who’d beat the shit out of a victim in a petrol station, then run him over.

      It’s like that lawyer joke: what do you if you bang down a lawyer? You reverse and hit him again. Ditto Chinese gangsters today; I’m sure those who were operating during the 1930s were vicious killers too.

      Anyway, evidence to the contrary, I’m pretty sure my granddad wasn’t like those fellas you see trying to beat up Ip Man. Matter of fact, I’ve never seen him behave violently during the twenty-plus years I knew him.

      But if you were a fat chicken and he wanted to boil your thigh for lunch, you were dead meat.

      Speaking of which, the great thing about most people from Hainan Island is they could cook. Maybe it’s the sand on the island but everyone born there could win Master Chef hands down. And many of them, my grandparents included, managed to find work as chief cooks for rich colonial bastards from London—which I’ve always found strange because my grandparents didn’t speak a word of English.

      BUT THEN THE 1940S’ arrived, bringing with them the Japanese, and shit got real.

      The storyline’s a little muddled here—and I don’t know exactly when the English cook-jobs started vis-à-vis the Japanese invasion—but I’m told my grandparents had to run like the refugees you see in Vietnam war movies. Clutching their belongings, fretting over whether it was more important to take the pot or more clothes, they ran.

      Towards God knows where, as long as the Japs weren’t in front of them.

      Which is unreal because the closest thing today to seeing Malaysians ‘run for their lives’ was during one of the Bersih rallies. I think it was the second one. The FRU clashed with the yellow-shirted mummies and daddies (some who rather moronically brought their kids along), tear gas was fired and one of my friends told me she had to jump over a wall.

      Like the opening minute of Dunkirk.

      That was close to the kind of running my grandfolks experienced, with one minor difference: If the Nippon boys caught them, they’d be sook-ching-ed.

      That’s the Graeco-French term for slaughtered like a Teo Chew pig.

      It’s a weird thing in Malaysia that almost everybody talks about ‘May 13’, the race riots where about 150 people died and stuff, but these same everybodies never mention that twenty plus years before 1969 the Chinese were hunted down and massacred by the Japanese by the thousands.

      Even as I’m saying this it remains difficult for younger folks like me to understand the plight of people like my grandparents. This was a mini Asian version of the Holocaust: if the Chinese were caught, they were killed.

      It’s that simple.

      No wonder decades later, when I was a teenager, I’d see my granny break down when she saw photos from the newspapers.

      One time, when I asked her why she was crying, she said it’s because the Japanese still refused to say sorry for their war crimes. Times were so bad then, she said, she couldn’t even nurse one of her babies (i.e. my aunt).

      It’s like her milk factories refused to run on account of the trauma.

      I wonder if this partially explains why my grandparents kept eating yam and sweet potato decades after the persecution; at the time it was their staple diet, nature’s gift to the Chinese fugitives, cheap and easy to find and grow. My grandparents fried and served yam and sweet potato almost every other day when I was small—were these root vegetables some unconscious symbol of their survival? We may never know.

      But I guess you’re wondering where the Mission Impossible segment is, right? Like any supreme bowl of assam laksa you order, don’t worry, it’s coming soon.

      FAST FORWARD another two or three decades, my grandparents are now in their 50s, they’ve got six kids.

      Or maybe it was seven and one died. I thought I heard about an aunt who died at the age of 1.5 because a pot full of boiling water fell on her. That’s the thing about folks from a few generations ago: Tragedy, heartache, unspeakable and pointless suffering—they just moved the hell on.

      Then came the split.

      Grandmum, so I heard, was a broken record and granddad had had enough of the music. I lived with both of them before, separately, and I tell you she never stopped yappin’. He? One might’ve thought him mute.

      Recipe for relationship disaster.

      Hence, the irony of my grandparents: They could survive absolute poverty and a Japanese invasion-cum-genocide, but they couldn’t survive each other.

      Now we come to the M.I. portion. Start paying attention.

      So this was the 90s’ k?

      Friends, X-Files, young Leo.

      Mobile phones so huge you could order an airstrike with them.

      The 90s’ was also the decade my first cousin proposed to his girlfriend. Pandemonium around

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